The customer acquisition strategy is difficult because trust in businesses has been eroding over time. Recently, HubSpot reported that 55% of consumers don't trust the brands they buy from as much as they once did. 65% of consumers distrust advertisements, and 71% distrust sponsored posts on social media.

A lack of brand trust has made the job of marketing and sales teams infinitely more challenging. To make matters worse, most companies fail to recognize the problem. As a result, they spend more money on "push" marketing tactics, particularly on social media, in hopes of gaining new customers.

Customer Acquisition: What Is It?

What is customer acquisition? It is the process of acquiring new clients or customers for your business. Any company wants to create a systematic and sustainable acquisition strategy that keeps up with industry trends.

Irrespective of the size of your business, this is an important aspect of running a business besides helping you turn a profit. Moreover, it demonstrates your business's traction to your partners, investors, influencers, and prospects.

What's the catch?

Online customer acquisition strategy should not be confused with lead generation. Businesses often visualize the customer journey as a funnel, as shown below.

During their journey through the customer acquisition funnel, consumers:

  1. Increase awareness of your brand and interest in your products
  2. You can add your products or services to the list of alternatives they're considering, and
  3. Become a paying customer of your business

The top of the sales funnel is devoted to lead generation. In the middle is lead acquisition. The bottom is lead conversion. Nevertheless, customer acquisition is the entire end-to-end process that involves all of these stages.

Customer Acquisition: The Best Strategy

Our discussion has already touched upon some of the key challenges brands face during eCommerce customer acquisition. The biggest challenge is a lack of trust in brands. That doesn't mean you can't improve your customer acquisition.

What can you do to improve your customer acquisition techniques?

The following are some evergreen customer acquisition strategies you can leverage to ensure you're always attracting new customers.

1. Define Your Target Audience

You must first identify the right users or potential audience for your company. Your product may be the perfect solution to a problem a certain demographic of consumers is facing. It’s only a matter of discovering who they are and focusing your customer acquisition efforts, primarily, on them.

A target customer is likely to limit your brand's ability to market effectively if you don't have one in mind. You would be better off finding a niche market if your offerings don't meet a universal need.

How can you find your target customers?

Make sure you complete market research and determine who and how you should market your product to win over new customers. According to Invesp, SaaS companies can double their paying customers by just offering a free trial without asking for their credit card information.

2. Choose the Right Acquisition Channel

Based on what we discussed above, it's not enough to know who your ideal customers are. Knowing the right channel to use to acquire said potential customers is equally important.

You can use a variety of different frameworks to identify the best channel to use for your customer acquisition campaigns. It takes a lot of experimenting to find the right channel, however.

If you want things to be easier for yourself, you should set clear goals for yourself and your campaign. Even having rough goals will help you understand whether your tactics are working. Having tested different channels, you will be able to compare their successes.

Get in touch with Selling Revolution if you need help with channel alignment or picking the right KPIs. They build selling systems that can help you generate more qualified leads.

3. Use video content to your advantage

What is customer acquisition marketing? The use of video marketing is on the rise. 81% of businesses use video marketing, up from 63% last year. 97% of marketers have found video content to increase customer understanding of their offerings. Meanwhile, 76% have found it helpful to increase web traffic and sales.

Video is one of the best ways to inform prospects about your brand and products since they are visual learners. Make sure your videos are both informative and interesting. Utilize influencers to create such videos, and share them on social media and your website.

Author's Bio: 

Arnaldo is an American writer for various digital news publications. After being in the eCommerce industry for more than 15 years, Arnaldo has a good understanding of what it takes to make an eCommerce business successful. He also likes to cover newsworthy events related to business management software, customer relationship management (CRM), and Quoting software